Simplified Heart Failure Clinic Questionnaire: A Practical Patient-Reported Symptom Survey

Managing chronic heart failure (HF) is challenging for clinicians across a variety of specialties. Many of the currently available symptom questionnaires are complex, time-consuming for patients to complete, and costly for providers or institutions to use. We created a simplified questionnaire that patients could easily use in a clinic setting, that would be free for the clinician/institution to use, and that would improve symptom assessment and better guide HF treatment. We implemented it in a pilot program. During our pilot study, we used the Simplified Heart Failure Clinic Questionnaire (SHFCQ) in over 1,000 patients. Still, we give three case examples in this article to show the benefits of using the symptom questionnaire within a variety of HF types. Each patient was given the SHFCQ during their HF clinic visits, and they were educated on its use. Clinicians and patients were able to give feedback about the questionnaire throughout the program, and the SHFCQ underwent three revisions to improve functionality and usability. This illustrative article highlights the preliminary use of the SHFCQ. We found that patients were very receptive to it and that it improved the providers' ability to dive deeper into the patient's reported symptoms and create a more tailored treatment plan. We feel that it has the potential to become a free, easy-to-use tool in the management of HF clinic patients. Further large-scale study is needed to validate the questionnaire's reliability and reproducibility.